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Kymlicka, Will; DONALDSON., SUE: What would Jesus do?
Queen's Quarterly (111:3) [Fall 2004] , p.380-393.
Citation
What would Jesus do?
Kymlicka, Will, DONALDSON, SUE. Queen's Quarterly. Fall 2004. Vol. 111, Iss. 3; pg. 380
Abstract (Summary)
Whatever the general merits of WWJD, its popularity amongst teenagers is particularity puzzling. After all, the New Testament is completely silent about [Jesus]' childhood, youth, and young adulthood, giving no indication of how he behaved during those crucial years. There are the infancy narratives in Luke and Matthew, covering his birth in Bethlehem, his presentation in the temple in Jerusalem, and the escape into Egypt, all of which occur in the first couple of years of his life. But after these stories about the baby Jesus there is a gap - a huge gap. The New Testament describes only one small incident from Jesus' childhood - the story of Christ, aged 12, in the temple, "... sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions" (Luke 2:46). Add to this a reference about Jesus being "the carpenter's son," and there you have the sum total of what the New Testament has to say about Jesus' youthful years. The Gospels don't pick up the story again until Jesus is aged thirty, ready to be baptized, and to begin his adult miracles and ministry.
The official church position is that we are told about Jesus on a need-to-know basis. From the "eloquent silence of the Evangelists" we can infer that between infancy and the start of his adult ministry Jesus lived an unremarkable, and unremarked, life - and we should be content to leave it at that. Jesus was not performing miracles, nor was he terrorizing his playmates, nor humiliating his teachers. Indeed, Aquinas is quite explicit that Jesus' first miracle was performed after the age of 30 when he turned water into wine at the marriage at Cana. Illiterate and unsophisticated believers may want and expect childhood miracles, but the church argues that true Christians must resist the urge to fill in Christ's missing years.
indeed the apocryphal gospels respond to some genuine intellectual puzzles in the Christian story. Why, for example, does Jesus only start performing miracles at the age of 30? The idea that God would endow people at a particular age with the capacity to perform miracles was a familiar and accepted one throughout the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds. But what distinguishes Christian doctrine is the assumption that Jesus is not just blessed by God, but that he is the incarnation of God. He is God made flesh, and his divine nature has been present from conception. When God says, at the start of Jesus' adult ministry, "This is my Son, with whom I am most pleased," he is not endowing Jesus with divine powers and blessings, he is simply revealing what Jesus already is, and has always been.
Full Text
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Copyright Queen's Quarterly Fall 2004
One of the most puzzling stories in the gospels is that of the withering fig tree, which Jesus appears to curse for having failed to provide him with fruit. Why, generations of Christians have wondered, should the Lamb of God act in such a vindictive way? The strange and fascinating world of the apocryphal gospels may shed light on this question. This is a scriptural netherworld that fills in various gaps in the Bible, sometimes with surprising results.
ACROSS America, millions of teenagers wear WWJD bracelets to remind them, in their day-to-day decision making, to consider what Jesus would do in their circumstances, and to lead their lives accordingly. The bracelets were the brainchild of Janie Tinklenberg, in her quest for a device to encourage thoughtful choices amongst young Christians. She never expected the bracelets to become a consumer phenomenon - the essential accessory for cool Christian youth. And the WWJD phenomenon isn't restricted to American youth. Al Gore and George W. Bush may not wear the bracelet, but they do claim to do the WWJD test whenever considering policy and legislation. What would Jesus do about gay marriage? Iraq? The spotted owl?
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SUE DONALDSON lives near Kingston, Ontario. Her first novel, Thread of Deceit, has just been published by Sumach Press (under the pen name Susan Cliffe).
WILL KYMLICKA holds the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University. His publications include Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction and Politics in the Vernacular (Oxford University Press).
The popularity of the WWJD movement has generated several spin-off movements, each with its own publications and websites, asking such questions as What Would Jesus Drive? (not a gas-guzzling SUV), or What Would Jesus Eat? - and How Would He Stay Fit? (a fish-based Mediterranean diet, and lots of walking).
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Needless to say, the WWJD movement has been criticized and parodied. (Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the spin-offs from the parodies.) Some critics denounce it as a simplistic and sanctimonious fad. Others point to the highly enigmatic nature of Jesus' behaviour and sayings in the Gospels, and the impossibility of extrapolating his views to current-day issues.
But whatever the general merits of WWJD, its popularity amongst teenagers is particularity puzzling. After all, the New Testament is completely silent about Jesus' childhood, youth, and young adulthood, giving no indication of how he behaved during those crucial years. There are the infancy narratives in Luke and Matthew, covering his birth in Bethlehem, his presentation in the temple in Jerusalem, and the escape into Egypt, all of which occur in the first couple of years of his life. But after these stories about the baby Jesus there is a gap - a huge gap. The New Testament describes only one small incident from Jesus' childhood - the story of Christ, aged 12, in the temple, "... sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions" (Luke 2:46). Add to this a reference about Jesus being "the carpenter's son," and there you have the sum total of what the New Testament has to say about Jesus' youthful years. The Gospels don't pick up the story again until Jesus is aged thirty, ready to be baptized, and to begin his adult miracles and ministry.
So what about schooling, playmates, peer pressure, and teenage rebellion? How did Jesus deal with obnoxious teachers, neighbourhood bullies, false friends, and dishonest adults? How did he respond to the thousand petty and not-so-petty indignities, betrayals, and dis-appointments that we all suffer in youth?
Young Christians looking to Jesus as an advisor will discover a blank slate concerning his childhood adventures and adolescent angst. Many must wish that the New Testament said a bit more about these "missing years." If so, they would not be alone. As it turns out, from the very early years of Christianity, adherents of the faith have felt a need to fill in the gaps in the life of Jesus.
A group of apocryphal writings, called the "Infancy Gospels," expand on the missing years. They include the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, commonly dated to AD 125, written originally in Greek, though versions also survive in Armenian, Ethiopic, Georgian, Latin, Irish, Syriac and Slavonic. Later elaborations include the "Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew," and the "Arab Gospel of the Infancy." These infancy gospels were widely translated and reproduced throughout the Middle Ages, making their way into popular songs and the visual arts, and shaping popular understandings of Jesus.
The widespread diffusion of the infancy gospels attests to the hunger of many Christians to know more about the life of their Lord. But the story told in these gospels is rather surprising, and indeed disturbing.
THE Infancy Gospel of Thomas begins innocently enough with a story of Jesus at five years of age playing on the Sabbath, modelling twelve sparrows out of clay. Other children run to their parents, accusing Jesus of profaning the Sabbath. When the adults arrive, Jesus claps his hands, crying, "Be gone," and the sparrows fly off chirping. If this story suggests a surprising irreverence for the Law, it can perhaps be excused as a child's naive enjoyment of his miraculous powers.
But then the gospel gets downright strange. Jesus gathers some pools of water near the crossing of a stream. Another child scatters the water with a willow branch. An angry Jesus says "You insolent, godless ignoramus, what harm did the pools and the water do to you? Behold, now you also shall wither like a tree and shall bear neither leaves nor root nor fruit." Immediately the child dies. The story is illustrated in a set of fourteenth-century wall tiles from a church in Tring, Hertfordshire, England.
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Then a child runs past Jesus carelessly, and bangs Jesus' shoulder. Jesus shouts, "You shall go no further on your way," and the child dies on the spot.
In other stories, Jesus leads his playmates into harm by encouraging them to try to mimic his awesome powers. A trio of these stories is illustrated in the Holkham Bible Picture Book, a fourteenth-century English manuscript. In the first story, Jesus walks on water, and when his playmates try to emulate him they drown. Then he slides down a sunbeam. When other children try to follow, they fall to their deaths. He plays a game called "conkers" with his ceramic pots, which remain intact. And when the children do the same with their pots, they smash to pieces.
In almost all of these stories, Jesus later resurrects his victims, often after remonstration from Joseph and Mary. But, understandably, this does not appease the parents of his playmates. They complain to Joseph, saying "Since you have such a child, you cannot dwell with us in the village; teach him to bless and not to curse. For he is killing our children." Jesus blinds them for their temerity. And Joseph, growing distraught, warns Mary: "Do not let him go outside the door, because anyone who angers him dies."
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In order to protect their children, parents start forbidding them to play with Jesus, and hide them when he approaches. In one story, the parents hide their children in an oven. Jesus, seeing through the ruse, asks the parents what is in the oven. When they answer "pigs," Jesus says, "So be it, let them be pigs." Then he opens the oven door, and out come pigs. (The monk who transcribed this story in a fourteenth-century manuscript added, perhaps as a joke, that this is why Jews shun pork - one of several anti-Semitic overtones in the manuscripts.)
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas also relates Jesus' difficulties at school. Pity the teacher who has to deal with a wunderkind with nothing to learn! In one episode, Jesus kills (and later resurrects) a teacher who has dared to slap him for disrespectful behaviour.
In other episodes, he just humiliates and confounds his teachers. The popularity of these stories is attested by the many extant variants. Here is one story of Jesus being taught his ABCs:
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Now a certain teacher, Zacchaeus by name... came near to Joseph and said to him, "You have a clever child, and he has understanding. Come, hand him over to me that he may learn letters, and I will teach him with the letters all knowledge, and how to address all the older people and to honour them as forefathers and fathers, and to love those of his own age."
And he told him [Jesus] all the letters from Alpha to Omega distinctly, and with much questioning. But he looked at Zacchaeus the teacher and said to him. "How do you, who do not know the Alpha according to its nature, teach others the Beta? Hypocrite, first if you know it, teach the Alpha, and then we shall believe you concerning the Beta." Then he began to question the teacher about the first letter, and he was unable to answer him.
And in the hearing of many the child said to Zacchaeus, "Hear, teacher, the arrangement of the first letter, and pay heed to this, how it has lines and a middle stroke which goes through the pair of lines which you see, (how these lines) converge, rise, turn in the dance, three signs of the same kind, subject to and supporting one another, of equal proportions; here you have the lines of the Alpha."
Now when Zacchaeus the teacher heard so many such allegorical descriptions of the first letter being expounded by the child, he was perplexed at such a reply and at his teaching and said to those who were present, "Woe is me, I am in difficulties wretch that I am; I have brought shame to myself in drawing to myself this child..."
This story cut a little too close to home for some of the early Church Fathers (who'd probably dealt with intransigent pupils themselves). Irenaeus, the second-century bishop of Lyons, singled out this "false and wicked story" for censure, and assured readers that Jesus would not humiliate his teachers (Against Heresies, 1.20.1).
NOT ALL of the infancy gospel stories portray Jesus as an enfant terrible. Others present his miraculous powers in a more benign light, such as the charming story (from the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew) of the Holy Family's flight into Egypt:
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And it came to pass on the third day of their journey, while they were walking, that Mary was fatigued by the excessive heat of the sun in the desert; and, seeing a palm-tree she said to Joseph, "I should like to rest a little in the shade of this tree." Joseph therefore led her quickly to the palm and made her dismount from her beast. And as Mary was sitting there, she looked up to the foliage of the palm and saw it full of fruit and said to Joseph, "I wish it were possible to get some of the fruit of this palm." And Joseph said to her, "I am surprised that you say so, for you see how high the palm-tree is, and that you think of eating its fruit. I am thinking more of the want of water because the skins are now empty, and we have nothing with which to refresh ourselves and our cattle."
Then the child Jesus, reposing with a joyful countenance in the lap of his mother, said to the palm, "O tree, bend your branches and refresh my mother with your fruit." And immediately at these words the palm bent its top down to the very feet of Mary; and they gathered from it fruit with which they all refreshed themselves. And after they had gathered all its fruit it remained bent down.... Then Jesus said to it, "Raise yourself, O palm, and be strong... and open from your roots a vein of water which is hidden in the earth and let the waters flow, so that we may quench our thrist." And it rose up immediately, and at its root there began to gush out a spring of water exceedingly clear and cool and sparkling...
The miracle palm story is illustrated in a fifteenth-century Flemish painting, and survives in more oblique form as a palm tree in the background of countless depictions of that iconographical mainstay, the flight into Egypt.
THERE are other incidents in the infancy gospels in which Jesus performs "good" miracles - healing his brother of snake bite, healing a woodsman who cut himself with an axe, multiplying the wheat harvest, etc. In general, however, the infancy gospels present a picture of Jesus that is likely to shock modern sensibilities, and it is the so-called "malevolent acts" that stand out. How could anyone have believed in such stories of a petulant and cruel Jesus? Why would anyone want to celebrate these stories by portraying them in church decoration or devotional manuscripts? Why didn't church authorities denounce these gospels?
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In fact, church authorities often deplored the content of the infancy gospels, and attempted to suppress them. As far back as the second century, Irenaeus called them "spurious" writings, "forged, to bewilder the minds of foolish men" (Against Heresies, 1.20.1). The fifth-century Gelasian Decree excluded the infancy gospels from the official canon, and declared them anathema. Yet they retained a hold on the popular imagination for many centuries, and indeed enjoyed a dramatic resurgence in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, when the church tolerated and even encouraged the collection, reproduction, and illustration of these tales. (Apocryphal stories of Mary's life were also enormously popular in this period.) The medieval illustrations in this article testify to this remarkable period of toleration, before the tales of Jesus' childhood deeds were finally suppressed by the combined assault of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter Reformation, each in its own way intent on ruthlessly suppressing unorthodox popular beliefs.
Few people today bemoan their suppression. The profound desire - indeed insistence - of early Christians to fill in the gaps in Jesus' life with various childhood marvels and miracles is now rejected as inappropriate and irreverent. According to today's critics, the infancy gospels were inspired less by reflection on Christian faith than by pagan traditions of magic and superstition, as well as the popular Greco-Roman tradition of writing biographies ascribing precocious childhood deeds to rulers and heroes. In other words, the early Christians are accused of filling in the missing years of Christ's life with pre-Christian, and indeed un-Christian, content.
The result, according to the harsh judgement of contemporary critics, is "a collection of legendary stories... told at times rather tastelessly" (New Catholic Encyclopedia), documents "without theological point or moral justification... of poor literary quality, and devoid of historical value" (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church).
This sort of criticism of the infancy gospels is perhaps best summed up by Frederic Farrar (writing in 1900): "The Christians who wrote the Apocryphal Gospels were not sufficiently instructed in reverence to abstain from filling up the interspaces of the eloquent silence of the Evangelists."
The official church position is that we are told about Jesus on a need-to-know basis. From the "eloquent silence of the Evangelists" we can infer that between infancy and the start of his adult ministry Jesus lived an unremarkable, and unremarked, life - and we should be content to leave it at that. Jesus was not performing miracles, nor was he terrorizing his playmates, nor humiliating his teachers. Indeed, Aquinas is quite explicit that Jesus' first miracle was performed after the age of 30 when he turned water into wine at the marriage at Cana. Illiterate and unsophisticated believers may want and expect childhood miracles, but the church argues that true Christians must resist the urge to fill in Christ's missing years.
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THIS ATTEMPT to explain (away) the infancy gospels as a product of popular superstition and pagan influences, wholly separate from true Christian doctrine, undoubtedly has some merit. However, it is important to remember that it was not illiterate peasants and labourers who compiled, copied, translated, and illustrated the infancy gospels. These gospels survived for 1,500 years because educated elites in the church found something of value in them.
And indeed the apocryphal gospels respond to some genuine intellectual puzzles in the Christian story. Why, for example, does Jesus only start performing miracles at the age of 30? The idea that God would endow people at a particular age with the capacity to perform miracles was a familiar and accepted one throughout the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds. But what distinguishes Christian doctrine is the assumption that Jesus is not just blessed by God, but that he is the incarnation of God. He is God made flesh, and his divine nature has been present from conception. When God says, at the start of Jesus' adult ministry, "This is my Son, with whom I am most pleased," he is not endowing Jesus with divine powers and blessings, he is simply revealing what Jesus already is, and has always been.
Viewed in this way, the idea that Jesus had a normal childhood and youth up to the age of 30 is puzzling. Would God Incarnate lead a normal childhood? For many Christians in the past - perhaps today as well - the answer is no. There simply had to be something remarkable and marvellous about his early years.
Aquinas was aware of this objection, and offered two reasons why it was right and proper that Jesus did not perform miracles before the age of 30. First, 30 was considered the age of perfection (since this was the age at which David became king), and it would be inappropriate to perform miracles before the age of perfection. This argument has found few takers. But his second argument is more interesting. He suggests that if Jesus had performed miracles as a child, then people would not have believed that he had a human nature in addition to his divine nature, and hence would not have understood his role in redeeming humanity. A period of normal human childhood was needed for everyone to see that Jesus was not just the son of God, but also a human being, whose suffering on the cross redeems our sin.
And here we get to the crux of the puzzle of the infancy gospels, and indeed to the mystery at the heart of all Christian mysteries: how are the human and the divine related in the person of Jesus? Aquinas offers us one model, in which Jesus' divine nature is in deep freeze until 30, at least in terms of his public behaviour. The apocryphal gospels offer another model, in which both the divine and the human are in play from infancy. Jesus exercises his divine powers from birth ("Every word he speaks, whether good or evil, was a deed and became a miracle," to quote the Infancy Gospel of Thomas). But, until he grows sufficiently in wisdom to exercise these powers more appropriately, he stumbles in all-too-human ways. Is this really such an implausible account of how divinity and humanity might be related in a child?
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Viewed this way, the infancy gospels are not just "tasteless" and "spurious," but can be appreciated as interesting attempts to struggle with a deep paradox at the heart of Christianity. Moreover, the enfant terrible portrayed in the apocryphal gospels is not based solely on pagan models: some of his actions echo Jesus' acts in the canonical Gospels. Consider the very strange episode in Mark (11:12-14; 20-21) in which Jesus blasts the fig tree en route to Jerusalem:
And on the morrow, when [Jesus and his disciples] were come from Bethany, he was hungry: And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet.
And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it....
And in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree dried up from the roots. And Peter calling to remembrance saith unto him, Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.
The Jesus portrayed in this passage - petulant, impulsive, prone to dramatic gestures and overreactions - is not so different from the Jesus of the infancy gospels. Indeed some commentators have argued that Jesus cursing the fig tree is the model used by the authors of the apocryphal stories.
Thoughtful Christians have agonized over this passage. Some argue that it is a mistranslation. Others argue that the disciples misunder-stood Jesus: he was not cursing the tree, but regretfully predicting its demise, and then was just too tired (and hungry?) to correct Peter. Others argue that fig trees sometimes do produce fruit out of season, ergo it is the tree, not Jesus, who behaved unreasonably. Indeed, Victorian tourists visiting the Holy Land used to search high and low to find such out-of-season figs, in the hope of removing the blemish from Jesus' honour.
Others, however, argue that the very strangeness of the story is an argument for its authenticity. As F.C. Burkitt, a former professor of divinity at Cambridge, puts it: "I cannot but suppose that the story in Mark, so odd, so unmoral, so unlike conventional ideas of what Jesus ought to have done and said, does really rest upon reminiscence, however inaccurate, of an actual occurrence." In other words, if the story weren't true, why on earth would it have been included in the Gospel?
In any case, the story remains a problem for modern readers, troubling us just as the apocryphal childhood stories do. Unreasonable, disdainful, bellicose, vindictive - these are hardly the qualities we expect from Jesus, and it is no wonder that so many people have wished to explain away the infancy gospels.
BUT ATTITUDES may be changing. The Nag Hammadi discoveries have reawakened interest in apocryphal texts more generally, and this interest is spilling over into serious study of the infancy gospels. There is also a growing view that scholarship must look at the "whole gospel" - canonical and apocryphal texts together, for the light each can shed on the other.
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Whether reading the infancy gospels would help young Christians apply the WWJD test to their angst-ridden teenage choices is another question. But any development that rescues Jesus from the role of Palm-Pilot philosopher, or self-help guru, is surely to be welcomed.
Notes
New Testament quotations are from the King James Bible. Translations of the infancy gospels are from J.K. Elliott, The Apocryphal Jesus: Legends of the Early Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
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Useful sources include: David R. Cartlidge and J. Keith Elliott, Art and the Christian Apocrypha (Routledge, London, 2001); Adey Horton, The Child Jesus (New York: Dial Press, 1975); Frederic Farrar, The Life of Christ: As Represented in Art (London: Macmillan, 1990); W.O. Hassall, The Holkam Picture Bible Book, facsimile edition (London: Dropmore Press, 1954); Maureen Boulton, "Evangile de l'Enfance," text and illustration in Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms. Selden supra 38, Scriptorium, Vol. 37/1 (1983), 54-66.
Indexing (document details)
Classification Codes 9172
People: Jesus Christ, Tinklenberg, Janie
Author(s): Kymlicka, Will, DONALDSON, SUE
Document features: Illustrations; References
Publication title: Queen's Quarterly. Fall 2004. Vol. 111, Iss. 3; pg. 380
Source type: Periodical
ISSN: 00336041
ProQuest document ID: 731799301
Text Word Count 3883
Document URL: http://0-proquest.umi.com.fama.us.es/pqdweb?did=000000731799301&Fmt=3&cli entId=43168&RQT=309&VName=PQD
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